Advocacy for expanding research on technologies, experiences, services, and beyond!

Abstract

Since the seminal work of Holbrook and Hirschman (1982), building experience has been a major issue in marketing. Everything that surrounds us is accompanied by an experience and is therefore part of what makes us human (Gustafsson and Kristensson, 2020). The literature has demonstrated the numerous positive impacts of a successful experience on key efficiency variables such as satisfaction, loyalty or, more recently, consumer engagement. Identified as an important research topic since Fisk et al. (1993), it is still remarkable that the study of experiences continues to generate so much interest almost 30 years later and is even reinvigorated by recent crises and ever-increasing technological developments. To examine customer experience, several streams of research coexist today in the literature and this pool of knowledge continues to grow. In 2013, RAM devoted a special issue to the shopping experience (Antéblian et al., 2013; Badot and Lemoine, 2013). However, almost 10 years later, despite a growing number of studies, scientific research remains fragmented and contradictory. The proliferation of articles addressing customer experience, in different research fields, has lead to theoretical fragmentation and confusion (Becker and Jaakkola, 2020). These ambiguities and the lack of a unified vision have reduced the effectiveness of research and management of the literature on experience (Law and Van Schaik, 2010), making it particularly complex to connect different literatures and perspectives. In addition, the collaboration and communication of marketing research with other research fields that address experience is now even more crucial to the scholarly community and practitioners (De Keyser et al., 2020). Several seminal articles (Becker and Jaakkola, 2020; De Keyser et al., 2020; Lemon and Verhoef, Advocacy for expanding research on technologies, experiences, services, and beyond!